This is pretty cool! Desktop Earth is a geographic wallpaper background for Windows that:
- Displays seasonal NASA Blue Marble Imagery, or a fixed Blue Marble image
- Displays day/night regions; options for city light displays in the night regions
- Gives you the option of overlaying current cloud imagery, with variable opacity
- Set the center of the image to any time zone
- Update interval for day/night from one minute to one hour
Control panel:
Cloud imagery is from the XPlanet project, and updates need to be specifically enabled (off by default):
And how it looks on my desktop:
If you’re not using Windows, you can use the Desktop Earth Online page to generate a static image that you can save to your computer and use as the wallpaper.